How much more calamity can East Africa take? Already struggling with the twin crises of the coronavirus pandemic and a biblical scourge of locusts, the region is now being lashed by exceptionally heavy rainfall, causing floods that threaten life and livelihood from Ethiopia to Tanzania and all parts in between.
For the continent’s most economically vibrant region, the trifecta of tribulations may well add up to a fourth: food scarcity. This ghost from East Africa’s past could hardly have picked a worse moment to return. The world is distracted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and traditional sources of succor — the United States and Europe — face their own economic distress. China, the region’s economic partner of choice in recent years, has not yet demonstrated the ability (or indeed the desire) to fill the vacuum.
Even before the floods, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was warning of "an unprecedented threat to food security” in East Africa. Blame the emergence of huge new locust swarms. The Climate Prediction and Application Center in Nairobi says locusts are "invading the Eastern Africa region in exceptionally large swarms like never seen before.”